Appreciate the thoughts, but 90 days is too long to live with ads on the site.

No reverse the order, 91 days ad free, then ads kick in.The point is that "fly by night users" who only stay a month then drift off need a good impression, it's only the "budding regulars" who end up seeing ads.

I do not want to put ads permanently on DC, and do not intend to do so, and won't be doing so.

I do not think we get the kind of daily traffic that would bring much income from ads (we have 35+ gigabytes a day of downloads of our software, which is pretty huge, but we do not have so many daily readers, the way a popular blog does)

This is really just a matter of being curious, nothing more.

I guess if you're already set on not doing the ads permanently, then my question would be what is the purpose/would be learned?

Tao, interesting idea.. but i'm afraid that would be a very narrow experiment..

Wraith, your question is the same as Chris's, and I don't have a very good answer.. It's just been a few years since we last tried it and I'm curious to what happens if we try it again.. How much revenue will ads generated? What kind of ads will it show? Will it change the number of people who donate? Will google change our search rankings? None of these reasons are particularly compelling, and if it would take a lot of work to put it in place it would hardly be worth the effort, but since we implemented it a long time ago it's really just a matter of throwing a switch.

I don't know answer to this question. All I can say is, that it shouldn't be the way with which people are moving away from any other annoying ad plastered site. It's about ad blindness and annoyance. I can tell you this from my experience, Adsense on tech site is going to earn less revenue from now on for plenty of reasons.

I think that a valuable thing has been said, no matter if this is for revenue or for curiosity... one month is not a long enough sample time. Any data taken based on that will be suspect at best. For example, look at the graph that mouser put up. During February there is a dip based on the anti-SOPA protest. Taken with that month by itself, your data would be corrupted by that one day. Similarly, during a month, an article or a thread or a piece of software can be slashdotted, lifehacked, etc, polluting the sample. Just my

I agree it's not a long enough sample time to get a really accurate picture -- but it should be enough to satisfy some curiosity by the time the month is over. We could always extend it a little bit if it looked like things were changing fast enough that we wanted to wait for them to settle.

Something I have always thought would be really funny is to turn the whole ad paradigm on its head and make the ADS BECOME the "Content!"

Make an ad page! Vote up or down your favorite ad! Nominate ads! Get innovative companies to authorize writing our own! Make a "bandwidth killer super ad page!" that crams as many things on one page as possible! You know, like this: http://anselme.homes...ad.com/AFPHAITI.html

In general I hate adverts, because I cannot trust them, and too often they are perverted.

But here at DonationCoder I really don't think ads have to be a problem.

First of all, in my opinion of course, they must never be mis-taken for anything else than what they are - meaning that people without blockers must not be led to think that this "recommended download" is a part of DonationCoder's text, or similar.

Secondly, they can only be placed where I quite often anyway am missing some part of something: in a column in the right margin.

Lastly, they should be moderated; "free download" means free. Etcetera.

With these three easy to handle rules, I will welcome the income to "our" site.

Project Wonderful sounds okay, even wonderful, but I don't trust it to make money.Do 'we' have any facts about it?